Color perception
dmunger | September 27, 2005All this talk about stereotypes can get you thinking. Perhaps some stereotypes reflect actual differences. Take color vision, for example: men often refer to themselves as "color-impaired," letting the women in their lives make home design decisions and even asking them to match clothing for them. Maybe they're just behaving in accordance with traditional stereotypes ... but maybe there's something more to it.
In the 1980s, vision researchers began to find some real physical differences between the eyes of many women and those of most men. "Normal" color vision is possible because we have…
dmunger | June 10, 2005When I was about twelve years old, I came up with an idea for a massive practical joke to play on an unsuspecting baby. For its entire childhood, everyone around the baby would conspire to convince it that the sky was green. Then at some point in the future, perhaps in front of the entire sixth grade class at Whitworth Elementary School, the truth would be revealed, and one poor kid's world would be turned upside-down.
Somehow I was never able to recruit enough people to pull this ruse off, but it does beg the question: would such a joke even be possible, or would our natural perceptual…
dmunger | January 30, 2005How do we see things in color? How do we know objects stay the same color when the color of the light they reflect changes as the lighting changes? We see this effect most dramatically in the theater, where the stage lights cover every color of the rainbow, yet we still know the heroine is wearing a purple dress and our hero has majestic blonde hair.
In today's reading ("Surface-Illuminant Ambiguity and Color Constancy: Effects of Scene Complexity and Depth Cues" by James M. Kraft, Shannon I. Maloney, and David H. Brainard of UC-Santa Barbara [Perception, 2002]), the authors explore some of…